Bill Rowen featured 11/3

11/3/14  Bill Rowen hosted by Jan

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Bill is in what he calls his "second poetry phase." He began writing poetry in the early 1980's, often reading at the Coffee Mill in Oakland, but after several years he dropped out of the poetry scene. After major cancer surgery in 2009, which was successful, he began writing again. Now living in Alameda, he is active in poetry groups there and throughout the Bay Area. He has won prizes at the Benicia Love Poetry contest, CFCP, Poets Dinner (although he didn't show up to collect his prize) and Mary Rudge's Site Write contest. He has been a lawyer for 37 years. This is his first featured reading at Poetry Express.

10/17/14 theme night Unrequited Love

10/27/14 Theme Night, topic: UNREQUITED LOVE, hosted by Nance

Entire Evening devoted to your poems loosely related to theme.

Harold Tzn featured 10/20

10/20/14 Harold Tzn  hosted by Odilia

Harold Terezón is an educator and poet from Pacoima, CA. He received the San Francisco Foundation's James D. Phelan Literary Award in 2013. He served as a teaching artist for WritersCorps from 2011-2013, helping San Francisco youth find their voice through poetry and writing. His work has appeared in POECOLOGY, Puerto del Sol, PALABRA, Rushing Waters Rising Dreams: How the Arts Are Transforming a Community, and The Acentos Review, among other publications. He is currently teaching poetry at City College of San Francisco and working on Hunting Izotes, a collection of poems inspired by his family's immigrant experience.

Laura Schulkind Featured 10/13

10/13/14 Laura Schulkind hosted by Odilia

Poet and writer Laura Schulkind is an attorney by day, where she is entrusted with others’ stories. Through fiction and poetry she tells her own. She and her husband divide their time between Berkeley and Big Sur California, and her two grown sons continue to inspire her. Her published work can be seen atwww.lauraschulkind.com

Snake and Toad

(Forge Journal, Fall 2012)

Braided into the scrub brush,

I saw them,

snake and toad,

black garter slender as my beckoning finger,

except for its bulging jaw     

stretched madly around half the toad,

head already gone,

belly the blue-white of fern tendrils still curled underground,

motionless except for the ripple of skin 

stretched thin across its still-beating heart.